Category: The Ramble (page 173 of 463)

For three years, Detective Jude Fontaine was kept from the outside world. Held in an underground cell, her only contact was with her sadistic captor, and reading his face was her entire existence. Learning his every line, every movement, and every flicker of thought is what kept her alive.

After her experience with isolation and torture, she is left with a fierce desire for justice—and a heightened ability to interpret the body language of both the living and the dead. Despite colleagues’ doubts about her mental state, she resumes her role at Homicide. Her new partner, Detective Uriah Ashby, doesn’t trust her sanity, and he has a story of his own he’d rather keep hidden. But a killer is on the loose, murdering young women, so the detectives have no choice: they must work together to catch the madman before he strikes again. And no one knows madmen like Jude Fontaine.

* * *

1) Choose a genre and stick with it

I actually learned this before writing The Body Reader, but bear with me because it does come into play again. Over the past thirty years I’ve written in almost every genre out there. One of the only ones missing from my résumé was science fiction, so when I received an exclusive invite to be part of a new mind-blowing enterprise for post-apocalyptic fiction, I jumped at the chance to dilute my brand even more.

2) Don’t get involved in startups

I need a tattoo of the above. Several years ago I was the launch author for a new publishing house called Quartet Press. My book was edited and formatted, the cover designed. I’d begun online promotion when I got the email announcing the plug had been pulled on Quartet Press. At that point I promised myself I’d never get involved in another startup. So when I was invited to be a part of the post-apocalyptic project, I jumped in with both feet. I had 25,000 words of a 40,000-word story done when that startup crashed and burned.

3) Never try to switch the genre of a written story

I thought it would be easy to remove the post-apocalyptic from The Body Reader. I’d at least set my tale in a present-day city. The main characters were detectives, people were being murdered, crimes investigated. There were dysfunctional families and broken heroes; it was a dark story. All I had to do was remove the post-apocalyptic stuff and get back on track to straight crime fiction, my genre. I didn’t fully understand that genre tone is deeply embedded in the writing, and this story oozed post-apocalyptic tone. An easy switch was impossible. Nothing worked. In the end, only 5,000 words survived.

4) Things no longer on the page still leave echoes

Even though I would never attempt switching the genre of a story again, I think the ghost of the original post-apocalyptic tale gives my straight crime fiction a slightly skewed feel that I like.

5) Don’t be tempted by projects that don’t advance your career

Over the last several years I’ve allowed myself to be tempted and distracted by all different kinds of projects that have nothing to do with what I consider my real career, which is crime fiction. I’ve written memoirs. I’ve written romance with a cat’s POV. I’ve written short stories about vampires and zombies and mermen and babies who write books while still in the womb. Some were things I felt compelled to do, such as the memoirs. Some were things that offered a fun distraction from my real job—writing crime fiction. All of those unrelated projects confused my core crime-fiction readers, so my plan going forward is no startups, no distractions and no temptations. Stick to my genre. So if you have a startup in need of someone to write a story about a two-headed naked mole rat that saves the world, let’s talk.

* * *

New York Times and USA Today bestselling author Anne Frasier has written twenty-five books that range through genres such as thriller, mystery, romantic suspense, paranormal, suspense, and memoir. Writing as Theresa Weir, she began her career in 1998 with Amazon Lily, a cult sensation and winner of multiple awards.

She has won the Daphne du Maurier Award for paranormal romance, and a RITA for romantic suspense. Her first memoir, The Orchard (Theresa Weir), was a 2011 O, the Oprah Magazine Fall Pick; #2; on the Indie Next List; and a Librarians’ Best Book of 2011. Her latest novel, The Body Reader, is out from Thomas & Mercer on June 21, 2016.

Anne Frasier: Website | Twitter

The Body Reader: Amazon | Goodreads

Today, Mashable drops a pretty big Life Debt excerpt. Go read it! It features Leia! And her baby! And the Force! And Luke! AND EWOKS.

(No, really.)

Some things you should know about the excerpt —

First, despite what the post says, I don’t consider Han and Chewie to be the “main focus” of the book. They are a focus, and are important to the story. So is Leia. So is the crew from the first Aftermath. SO IS RAE SLOANE AND MISTER BONES AND ahhhhh eeee wooo. Ahem. What I’m saying is, check your expectations and don’t go thinking this is a Han-and-Chewie adventure from the first to last page.

Second, this is not an interlude.

Third, the excerpt loses some formatting. In the book, it contains italics to identify and separate Leia’s thoughts, and honestly, I consider that formatting vital — it reads harder without it.

Fourth, I love this excerpt. I adored writing it. I still adore it now that I’m reading it again.

I hope you like it.

Life Debt comes out July 12th, so preorder now.

As a total fantasy, because none of this is going to happen given our current Congress, let’s play a game of: how would Chuck Wendig do gun control? Like, if I had magical control over all governmental processes, how would I, a humble dipshit, control guns?

Let’s throw up some caveats, though, first.

First, I grew up around guns. My father operated a gun store and also was a gunsmith in his spare time. I reloaded ammo for him. We hunted. I still hunt. I wouldn’t call myself an expert, but I am no amateur. When I say I grew up around guns, I mean it — every room had at least one. The gunshop had a couple hundred. I got a new gun or knife damn near every Christmas. (Note: we never had any military-style “black rifles” around our house. My father didn’t like them, and he passed that feeling down to me.)

Second, let’s all gather around and remember that the Constitution is a living document. Not literally — it won’t fly around the room like a haunted specter, howling the Bill of Rights into your ear. I mean, it is a document meant to change — not easily, no, but it is doable. The Constitution is just a thing we made up. It isn’t a divinely-inspired document. God did not make America. Men did. Old, white guys from a couple centuries back. Jesus did not shit the Constitution into existence. Further, the Second Amendment isn’t an aperture that’s all-the-way open. That word, “well-regulated,” has (arguable) meaning. You can slippery slope it all you like, claiming that any regulations or restrictions on firearms is a restriction on the second amendment, but it’s too late. We already have restricted weapons. You cannot easily go buy an automatic weapon. (Contrary to popular belief, you can actually buy one. It just takes 6-9 months to get approved.) If any restrictions or regulations are in place on any firearm, then the slope is already slippery. It already happened. Barn door’s open. Horse is out. (Also note, Supreme Court declined to reconsider an assault rifle ban in CT.)

Third, banning individual weapons is a fraught path. You can ban certain models, but then there will just be new models. You can ban so-called “assault rifles,” but recognize that definition is more political than technical. Don’t get me wrong — I’m not on the train that anybody “needs” an AR-15. Sure, I know people like them for hunting, but I’m a little old school — you need an AR-15 for hunting, I’d suggest you learn to be a better hunter. (I have opinions about home defense, too, and I still don’t think you need one of those guns.) Just the same, the irony of regulating assault rifles is that they’re a small portion of the problem. You want to regulate them, but nobody says “boo” about handguns, which are the real problem. They’re concealable, semi-auto, and hold enough bullets to kill a bunch of people. A Glock 17 has 17 rounds in its magazine, and you can carry a bunch of magazines on you — okay, sure, it doesn’t afford the accuracy or stability that a semi-automatic rifle would, nor as many accessories, but you do earn the ability to easily conceal. Roughly 75% of gun homicides are committed with handguns.

Fourth, the folks who think “banning all guns” is the answer are, I fear, living in a unicorn world. Nearly 200 million firearms are out there. Somewhere between 40-50% of all households in America own a gun. We are a culture of gun owners. It’s in our pop culture, too. We all have a little Wild West blood in our veins. We’re all cowboys and scoundrels, all soldiers and cops. I know! It worked in Australia. It worked in the UK. And yet, those are relatively small countries comparatively. Plus, the United States is practically 50 little countries stapled together.

Fifth, I’m not sure insurance is the way to go — I’ve seen that a lot and I’ve posited it myself. I’m ignorant of how insurance works, but I have to imagine that insurance on weaponry is also a fraught path. Would an insurance company even have interest in that risk? Would the risk and the cost be so high that it would be a sneaky sideways ban on firearms? Maybe.

Sixth and finally, let’s get shut of the talk surrounding the terrorist watchlist. It’s a problematic list that contains a few thousand American names for reasons unknown.

Oh, and hey, one more: let’s also get shut of the paranoid delusion that we need our guns to revolt against our government. I appreciate that you think this is a good idea, but it is a child’s fantasy. Sure, maybe there will be some kind of apocalypse — some climate change ruination, some pandemic, some whatever — but I’d rather not legislate based on doomsday scenarios. We already have people dying in this country right now due to firearms. How about we worry about the problem in front of us rather than the imaginary zombies we fear will come clawing at our door? (Oh, and for the people who want to battle their own government, I’d argue that you should train less with guns and train more with computers. The government can outmatch you on the guns, son, but you could probably hack the shit out of their systems.)

SO, OKAY, with all that said, what do I, humble dipshit, do?

1.) Close up the secondary market loopholes. Right now, anybody can sell a gun to anybody and it isn’t tracked, nobody knows, it’s just a fluid de facto black market. You can go to a gun show and walk out with a gun because that person doesn’t need a license to sell and you don’t need a license to buy. And have you been to a gun show? Oh, you should go. You will see so much KKK and Nazi propaganda, it’s like a history lesson in horrible human beings. (I also grew up around gun shows, and once upon a time, they were not this way. But I’ve been to a couple since Obama has been elected and ha ha oh shit.) If I sell a car, I have to have the title (though there are ways to wriggle around that). A car is a less lethal, more functional device than a gun, and so suggesting that gun sales be tracked and titled — not really that extreme.

2.) Track all gun sales. All of them. Track all the guns. ALL OF THEM. Oh, I know, I know, you precious dears don’t want to be on “a list.” But you’re already on a bunch of them. You’re not ronin ninja sneaking in the dark-net off the grid, buddy. Got a social security number? A driver’s license? Any bank or credit card statements? You pay your taxes? You’re already on a buncha lists. And maybe, just maybe, you can stop clenching your sphincter about the gun list. The government is not going to use it to come and take away your guns. If you get all blustery about being on that list — a legal, above-board, non-criminal list — then I actually start to worry you’re going to kill somebody with that gun. You know who doesn’t worry about their name being on lists? Normal, run-of-the-mill, non-killery gun owners.

3.) Keep rifles and shotguns easy to procure, as in Canada. Also as in Canada, make it harder to get handguns and higher-capacity semi-auto rifles. They basically have, what, three categories in Canada? Non-restricted, restricted, and prohibited. For purposes of AMERICAN FREEDOM !!11! let’s get rid of “prohibited” here and simply create classes of restrictedness — you could, say, bump handguns and semi-auto rifles up to Title II, make them much harder to procure. I know, someone out there has a real itchy butthole that they might need to wait six months to buy a pistol or an AR-15, but some hunting licenses take a while to get, and if OMG I NEED A PISTOL TODAY TODAY TODAY it’s probably a good bet you’re raring to shoot someone. If you can say, “Yeah, I can wait six months to get that high-powered lead-spitting shooty-shooty death device,” I think I trust you a whole lot more than the guy who needs it holy shit right now.

4.) Wanna own a firearm? You need a firearm license. It’s like a driver’s license. It’s like a hunting license. It’s like a fishing license — oh, and let that sink in. You need a license to wiggle a worm in the water to catch a trout, but you don’t need a license to buy a machine that can push a projectile through someone’s face at 1100 feet-per-second. Yes, some of that has to do with conservation, but I’d go out on a limb and say we need to consider the conservation of human lives, too.

5.) A firearms license would be like a driver’s license — getting your license the first time would be subject to both training and testing. If it is reasonable to ask that people be trained when operating a vehicle, it is reasonable to ask that people be trained when operating a firearm. This is a win-win for everyone, by the way. The NRA is the one who does most of the training in this country, and would benefit. It would create new jobs. It would ensure that people with guns were trained with them — and would likely offer some training regarding defense with a gun, too. (The fact the NRA does not support training enforcement is to me the clearest indication they support gun manufacturers more than its members. Training helps everybody but the manufacturers.)

6.) Owning firearms of different restricted classes would not only require longer wait times but also more training and, I dunno, a stamp on your license.

7.) Universal background checks — but that could be tied into the licensing, too.

8.) Israel restricts the number of weapons you can have — it’s pretty strict, if I recall. One of each type, essentially, and only if you can show you belong in certain roles. That won’t fly here to that degree, and I can speak to the fact that hunters do in fact use more than one type of gun. Around here, you can’t use rifles to kill much of anything, so that means a 12 gauge for deer, a 20 gauge for birds, a .410 for squirrels. But, some limits could be reasonable on the number of firearms you can own in each class and at each restriction level — you have some ‘splainin’ to do if you need like, 20 handguns. Restricting the number potentially undercuts and identifies people who are hoarding arsenals.

9.) Tax ammunition — casings, bullets, powder, too. I know, you don’t wanna pay more for ammo, but newsflash: any time gun control measures come up for even the whisperiest whisper of debate, prices go up because of price gouging. You’re already paying more thanks to people selling them to you. I was at a gun show just after Obama got elected, and many of the sellers had warnings up at their stalls about how Obama was coming to take their guns (spoiler alert: he wasn’t), and the prices at those tables were jacked up to exorbitant levels.

10.) Restrict certain accessories. We already restrict some, so it’s not strange to want to make sure people can’t buy a drum mag for a rifle — if you need 100 bullets immediately accessible? No.

11.) Make sure all this works nationwide, not just state-to-state. Certainly states could increase the severity of the restrictions if the constituents so demand, but gun control really only works well when it crosses state borders. Also, help the CDC study gun violence. (The restriction against it is no longer in place, but the money for those studies is also not in place. We need to study gun violence and it is perfectly reasonable to do so. Science and data can save us if we let it.)

And that’s it. It’s a start. It’s common sense. It’s nothing particularly revolutionary — for the most part, it assumes if you’re a responsible, law-abiding gun owner, nothing really changes for you except for the interjection of bureaucracy. (And I know bureaucracy is a bad word, but effective bureaucracy is valuable, and far greater than chaos and gun death.) Yes, it makes it harder to get a gun. It should be be harder to get a gun. There’s nothing wrong with it being difficult to procure a weapon that can kill several people in the span of minutes — and let’s remember, firearms have one primary purpose, and that purpose is death and injury. Target shooting is just a proxy for shooting at living targets. Hunting and defense are both part of that equation, and hunting and defense are based on death and injury. (I don’t magically shoot meat out of a turkey and he gobbles merrily and runs on while I collect my bullet-harvested roast. This isn’t Minecraft.) So, if we are to assume that the role of a firearm is to throw metal really fast through flesh in order to injure, incapacitate or kill, then it is probably also safe to assume that there should be a few speedbumps and cross-checks for people wanting that ability.

For those folks who think this is either:

a) not enough

or

b) too much

I have this to say:

Political process is founded on compromise. What I’ve outlined is exactly that. It is middle-ground, common sense regulation — nothing particularly dramatic. Just meant to tighten things up — once upon a time, even someone like Reagan was on board with common sense controls. The NRA was, too. That’s all changed with the increased rhetoric in this country, and we need to cut that off at the knees — but you also have to recognize we can’t just snap our fingers and make the problem go away. Guns aren’t going to go to vapor. Gun culture isn’t going to just disintegrate, either. Any changes we make will have to be sensible and moderate.

But don’t worry, it doesn’t matter anyway. Nothing’s going to change and nobody’s going to do anything and the only needle that’s moving is the one marking the number of people killed.

I’ll also finish up with this:

Vote in November. You want to see change, that’s the only way to get it.

And don’t just vote this November.

Vote every November. Vote actively, eagerly, and every time you have the chance. Owning a gun is a freedom we’re so keen to protect, fine. We also must recognize that voting is a vital freedom, too, and we should be not only keen to protect that right — but also desperate to engage with the political process, because that’s the only way your voice is measured and heard. Not just through tweets, not through petitions, not through changed avatars. But voting.

Comments are on, but moderated.

Don’t get fighty. Don’t be a jerk. I will boot you into the spam oubliette because this is my house and I don’t mind hearing you squawk down there in the dark.

That image is a blueberry.

Actually, it’s one blueberry among many — I was washing them one day to make muffins, and the waterdrops rested on them just so. I nabbed my camera, and there we are. An otherworldly shot — as if looking upon a bubbled dome sitting upon an alien hillock somewhere. Nobody says “hillock” anymore but fuck it, it’s an alien planet. We can go with “hillock” if we want.

Let’s see, what else is going on?

I forgot a flash fiction challenge Friday (well, I was traveling Friday and accessing my blog remotely is not always ideal in terms of inputting new content). Sorry! Eek.

I’ll be in Doylestown, PA this Tuesday at Doylestown Books to chat with Paul Tremblay, whose astonishing (and disturbing!) Disappearance at Devil’s Rock comes out.

This week is the launch of the Star Wars: The Force Awakens comics adaptation, by Luke Ross (art) and myself. So go look for that. Or BB-8 will electrocute you.

Tor-dot-com did a post about where to start with my novels, if you’re so inclined. (The comments, perhaps predictably, spend time yelling about Aftermath? I shouldn’t be surprised any more, I guess.)

The Orlando Book Festival was a blast — a great festival with wonderful fans and run by killer staff at a beautiful library. It’s also nice to see that it’s a city that stands tall in the face of tragedy and supports its LGBT citizens. (I’m sure there are gnarlier politics at work, but at least from a cursory visit, the streets and businesses were alive with support and love.)

THAT IS ALL.

Now go forth and slay Monday. Bring me its head. So I can take macro photos of it.

To win an impossible war Captain Kel Cheris must awaken an ancient weapon and a despised traitor general.

Captain Kel Cheris of the hexarchate is disgraced for using unconventional methods in a battle against heretics.  Kel Command gives her the opportunity to redeem herself by retaking the Fortress of Scattered Needles, a star fortress that has recently been captured by heretics.  Cheris’s career isn’t the only thing at stake.  If the fortress falls, the hexarchate itself might be next.

Cheris’s best hope is to ally with the undead tactician Shuos Jedao. The good news is that Jedao has never lost a battle, and he may be the only one who can figure out how to successfully besiege the fortress.

The bad news is that Jedao went mad in his first life and massacred two armies, one of them his own.  As the siege wears on, Cheris must decide how far she can trust Jedao–because she might be his next victim.

* * *

Be able to summarize the idea in one sentence.

Once upon a time, during my *previous* attempt to write a novel, someone at a convention asked me what it was about. I hemmed and hawed and tried to figure out how to explain the three braided plot strands and the battles and the steam cannon and the *things* and eventually emerged with a sad, unhelpful, “It’s complicated.”

What I have learned since then is that “It’s complicated” is a symptom that something is whackadoodle with the structure. _Ninefox Gambit_ takes place in a complicated *world*, but I always had a crystal-clear idea of what the story was about: the battle of wits between a disgraced captain and her undead advisor, a brilliant tactician and mass murderer who might be out to kill her next. That character dynamic is the backbone of the entire novel.

Writing is about math.

No, really! I’m not just saying that because I majored in math. One of the most valuable lessons I learned from integral calculus is that even infinitesimals may yet sum up to something big. The non-calculus writing-relevant version of this is that if you write every day, even a little bit, that all adds up. And the flip side is that if you write zero words, your wordcount doesn’t advance.

Now, sometimes you have to take days off because your kid is sick, or you’re working out that worldbuilding bit in the middle of chapter 7. That’s fine too! But if there is a *habit* of zero-word days, that novel isn’t going to write itself. (Trust me, if I knew a magic way of making novels write themselves, I wouldn’t just be doing it, I would be working as a consultant to writers and getting rich doing *that*.)

Don’t be afraid to revise.

This novel went through six drafts. A whole lot of things in the rough draft didn’t make it to the final one, including the ill-advised scene with the slaughter of geese. (Fear not, goose-lovers; geese are still mentioned. SPACE GOOSE!)

Once in a while I run into someone who’s familiar with my short fiction and who thinks things come out perfectly on the first try. One, that’s very flattering (God knows, the short fiction isn’t perfect either), and two, that’s only because they haven’t seen my rough drafts. Most of my rough drafts are laugh-out-loud terrible.

I’ve heard that some writers prefer drafting and some prefer revisions. I belong firmly to the revisions side. Generating words is painful! But I find it easier to revise words that exist than to bring into being words that didn’t use to exist. No matter how awful a rough draft is, I can always make it better, especially with the help of betas.

Pay attention to the beta readers, but don’t lose sight of the magic.

This novel benefited tremendously from a number of beta readers. One of them in particular, Daedala, helped me grapple with structure. I’m mostly used to short stories so figuring out how to scale up and handle the emotional beats and so on was an interesting challenge.

On the other hand, sometimes the beta readers have suggestions that might make the book a better book, but a *different* better book than the one you wanted to write. In this case, one beta reader suggested deleting Jedao’s massacre from his backstory. The novel that would have resulted would possibly have been a good book. But it also would have killed the point of writing it in the first place. I had a whole scheme that the massacre fit into, and I was willing to fix things around it, but not to remove one of the keystones of the plot that made it exciting to write in the first place.

Ergonomics, ergonomics, ergonomics.

I wrote large portions of _Ninefox Gambit_ with a fountain pen (either a Webster Four-Star or a Waterman 52V–if you pay attention you may see my acknowledgment to the Waterman in the story!). This was one of the better decisions I made, although it was a complete coincidence. As it turns out, writing properly with a fountain pen is easy on the wrists, and even writing not-quite-properly is helpful. And bonus, because I used about ten zillion different colors of ink, the rough draft looks like My Little Pony vomit!

Eventually, though, I had to type the whole shebang into Scrivener. I do use an ergonomic keyboard (a Kinesis Advantage, which I love but has a learning curve), but in the white-hot heat of *please let this novel be done* in the last two days, I think I typed something like 8,000 words/day both days.

I ended up in the doctor’s office a week later with pain in my wrists because I had given myself arthritis from typing too much, too fast. Don’t let this be you! And it could have been so much worse. These days, I try to do typing with the Kinesis, but I’m using a standing desk and I also make a point of quitting or taking breaks if my wrists start to twinge, or just taking breaks frequently, period. Write, yes, but write healthily!

* * *

 A Korean-American sf/f writer who majored in math, Yoon finds it a source of continual delight that math can be mined for story ideas. Yoon’s fiction has appeared in publications such as F&SF, Tor.com, and Clarkesworld Magazine, as well as several year’s best anthologies.

Yoon Ha Lee: Website | Twitter

Ninefox Gambit: Amazon | Rebellion Store

Cassandra Khaw went for a bit of a tear on Twitter about voice in one’s writing — and how every writer has a different feel to a voice, but also how a lot of advice tries to sand that down so we all write the same. She’s right to be vexed by that, and so when she wrote a guest post on that very vexation, well, c’mon. It’s too good not to post. (And as you’ll see below, she’s also too good a writer to ignore…)

* * *

Voice.

I got angry about a picture a few weeks ago. This one, to be specific.

Now, there’s nothing ostensibly wrong about that advice, and it does drive its point home by being an ugly sentence, full of unnecessary words, and utterly devoid of music. Taken objectively, it’s good advice, especially for new writers who are fresh to the fray.

So, why was I so vexed?

Because of how the writer’s group responded to it. There’s a tangible aura of scorn, I suppose, for anyone who dips into the purple territory, for anything that doesn’t involve the most efficient language. Hell, I remember one guy declaring that ornate writing prevents you from being published. For anyone already in the industry, it’d simply be an opinion, to be discarded or internalized as necessary. But in a community with young writers, new writers? Writers who haven’t yet developed the confidence to put themselves out there? Writers who have not discovered if their prose is closer to poetry, or if a love for mathematical equations might permeate their words?

That’s dangerous.

Voice.

Voice is interesting. Voice isn’t just your go-to vocabulary, your understanding of grammatical structure, your knowledge of rhythm. Voice is more ambiguous, more ethereal. I’ve never quite figured out how to categorize it. But it is that thing that makes you you, even when someone else has channeled your style. It is an echo of your soul, your thoughts, a piece of you that strings itself through your words, immortalized in the cadence of your paragraphs, the poetry of your observations.

It is a precious thing that can take years to cultivate, years to develop. It’s something that never really quits growing either. It is unique to you, and only you, and it is the thing that makes a piece of writing sing. (Because, you know, voice and song and the collaboration between larynx and music — I’ll stop now.)

And here’s the point I’m trying to make: voices can be silenced. It’s no secret that writing can be an incredibly raw act. The decision to put yourself out there for public scrutiny? That’s a terrifying choice to make. Now, imagine being that afraid and being told, “Hey, by the way? People aren’t going to like you.”

Now. This shouldn’t be conflated with good critique. (There’s an entire post to be written about bad critique, especially when it’s fueled by negative emotion.) Critique can be fantastic. But it’s a different thing entirely when someone else is trying to police your technique. Sure, everyone needs a foundation. Give that new writer a book to read, a piece of advice to follow, a set of guidelines to look over? But tell them also: This is what people say, but this isn’t what you have to do.

After that? Get out of the way.

Because you don’t need to be there when the author is developing their voice, not unless you’re specifically asked to be. You don’t need to influence them. They can decide who influences them. They can choose to call up a little bit of Lewis Carroll, pair it with a glimmer of Anne Leckie. They can decide if they want to be inspired by Brooklyn hip-hop, or if they want to lace it with the patois of their own history.

And if they’re allowed to do this, if they’re given time to grow, the results can be so beautiful. Look at this excerpt from Peter Watts’ The Things.

It was malformed and incomplete, but its essentials were clear enough. It looked like a great wrinkled tumor, like cellular competition gone wild—as though the very processes that defined life had somehow turned against it instead. It was obscenely vascularised; it must have consumed oxygen and nutrients far out of proportion to its mass. I could not see how anything like that could even exist, how it could have reached that size without being outcompeted by more efficient morphologies.

Nor could I imagine what it did. But then I began to look with new eyes at these offshoots, these biped shapes my own cells had so scrupulously and unthinkingly copied when they reshaped me for this world. Unused to inventory—why catalog body parts that only turn into other things at the slightest provocation?—I really saw, for the first time, that swollen structure atop each body. So much larger than it should be: a bony hemisphere into which a million ganglionic interfaces could fit with room to spare. Every offshoot had one. Each piece of biomass carried one of these huge twisted clots of tissue.

Don’t read it in a gulp. Breathe it in. It is dense. Watts’ retelling of The Thing pulls from his scientific background, uses terminology that others would shy from. Vascularised. Morphologies. Ganglionic. Not necessarily difficult words, but words that layer into the density of his writing, which requires patience and a willing to scavenge for meaning in the jargon. But so rewarding for it. This is clearly what it is, what it should be: a scientist’s voice.

And now, an excerpt from Catherynne Valente’s The Lily and the Horn.

My daughter and I fetch knives and buckets and descend the stairs into the underworld beneath our home. Laburnum Castle is a mushroom lying only half above ground. Her lacy, lovely parts reach up toward the sun, but the better part of her dark body stretches out through the seastone caverns below, vast rooms and chambers and vaults with ceilings more lovely than any painted chapel in Mother-of-Millions, shot through with frescoes and motifs of copper and quartz and sapphire and opal. Down here, the real work of war clangs and thuds and corkscrews toward tonight. Smells as rich as brocade hang in the kitchens like banners, knives flash out of the mist and the shadows.

I have chosen the menu of our war as carefully as the stones in my hair. All my art has bent upon it. I chose the wines for their color—nearly black, thick and bitter and sharp. I baked the bread to be as sweet as the pudding. The vital thing, as any wife can tell you, is spice. Each dish must taste vibrant, strong, vicious with flavor. Under my eaves they will dine on curried doves, black pepper and peacock marrow soup, blancmange drunk with clove and fiery sumac, sealmeat and fennel pies swimming in garlic and apricots, roast suckling lion in a sauce of brandy, ginger, and pink chilis, and pomegranate cakes soaked in claret.

Less complex language, but no less intricate. Common wisdom suggests that you should show and not tell, that a feast can and should be quickly encapsulated in a few lines, instead of explained to a fine detail. But this story is so much richer because Valente ignores that rule, and instead allows us to taste, feel, and experience every nuance of the world.

Of course, you don’t need to be bombastic to have beautiful writing. Seth Dickinson’s writing is sharp, economical. It is poetic, certainly, but one that has been mapped out to a letter, ruthlessly clean. From his recent Laws of Night and Silk:

Warlord Absu wears black beneath a mantle of red, the colors of flesh and war. For a decade she has led the defense of the highlands. For a decade before that—well: Kavian was not born with sisters, but she has one. This loyalty is burnt into her. Absu is the pole where Kavian’s needle points.

“Lord of hosts,” Kavian murmurs. She’s nervous tonight, so she bows deep. The warlord considers her in brief, silent reserve.

“Tonight we will bind you to a terrible duty. The two mature abnarchs are our only hope.” Her eyes! Kavian remembers their ferocity, but never remembers it. She is so intent: “You’re our finest. But one error could destroy us.”

And Malon Edwards’ writing? The Half Dark Promise is an absolute triumph, one that does not rewrite its core to fit everyone. It uses words and sentence structures that are uniquely its own. It doesn’t pause to explain every word, like what we’re often told to do, to provide English translations for foreign words. And that decision makes this story all the more powerful.

I was surprised on the first day of school when Bobby took my hand on our walk home. He was nervous. He flushed rose-red down to his neck. But he didn’t let go. He’d signed the half dark promise just like every other timoun in Chicago. Even lekòl segondè elèv yo with their teenage swagger and their foul mouths held hands on the walk home. Bobby’s hand was sweaty. Large. Callused. The hands of a smith’s son. But I didn’t mind. Vrèman vre—truth be told—I was just pleased Bobby wasn’t calling me names while speaking to me. That didn’t happen at my old school. Actually, that didn’t happen at my new school, either.

I could give you a thousand examples, point you to a hundred more writers, each completely different from the next. My own work is influenced by my native tongues, my national background. Hokkien is tonal and I look to find a kind of music in words. I think also in smells, tastes, regardless of whether they’re foul or delicious. Here’s an excerpt from my upcoming novella Hammers on Bone.

“Yeah?” I champ at my cigarette, bouncing it from one corner of my mouth to the other. There’s a pervasive smell in the hallway. Not quite a stench, but something unpleasant. Like the remnants of a molly party, or old sex left to crust on skin. “What about his old man? He working the kid? That why your son isn’t showing up at school?”

The broad twitches, shoulders scissoring back, spine contracting. It’s a tiny motion, one of those blink-and-you-lose-it tells but oh, do I catch it. “My fiance doesn’t involve our sons in hard labor.”

“Uh huh.” I rap ash from my cigarette and grin like the devil come to dine on Georgia. “Mind if I look around?”

‘Old sex left to crust on skin.’ I’ve had beta readers tell me that the description turned their stomachs, concise as it is.

And honestly, when you get right down to it, There is no one shape for writing to take, no singular form that is better than any other. Voice is unique, and voices need room to exist.

Let them grow.

You don’t want to miss seeing what they could be.

* * *

Cassandra Khaw is a London-based writer who still has her roots buried deep in Southeast Asia where there are sometimes more ghosts than people. Her work tends to revolve around intersectional cultures, mythological mash-ups, and bizarre urban architecture. When not embroiled in fiction, she writes about technology and video games for a variety of places including RockPaperShotgun and Ars Technica UK.

Offerings of fluffy things are always welcomed.

Cassandra Khaw: Website | Twitter